The claimed invention relates to personalized sound systems, and more particularly to an effective method for generating a personalized hearing profile.
It is widely understood that hearing levels vary widely among individuals, and it is also known that signal processing techniques can condition audio content to fit an individual's hearing response. Individual hearing ability varies across a number of variables, including thresholds of hearing, or hearing sensitivity (differences in hearing based on the pitch, or frequency, of the sound), dynamic response (differences in hearing based on the loudness of the sound, or relative loudness of closely paired sounds), and psychoacoustical factors such as the nature or and context of the sound. Actual injury or impairment, physical or mental, can also affect hearing in a number of ways. The most widely used gauge of hearing ability is a profile showing relative hearing sensitivity as a function of frequency, generally called a hearing profile, discussed in more detail below. Yet, it remains true that the art has not succeeded in providing a system for effectively and rapidly generating individual hearing profiles.
The most widespread employment of individual hearing profiles remains in the hearing aid field, where some degree of hearing impairment makes intervention a necessity. This application entails detailed testing in an audiologist or otologist office, employing sophisticated equipment and highly trained technicians. The result is an individually-tailored hearing aid, utilizing multiband compression to deliver audio content exactly matched to the user's hearing response. It will be understood that this process is expensive, time-consuming and cumbersome, and it plainly is not suitable for mass personalization efforts.
The rise of the Internet has offered the possibility for the development of personalization techniques that flow from on-line testing. Efforts in that direction have sought to generate user hearing profiles by presenting the user with a questionnaire, often running to 20 questions or more, and using the user input to build a hearing profile. Such tests have encountered problems in two areas, however. First, user input to such questionnaires has proved unreliable. Asked about their age alone, without asking for personal information, for example, users tend to be less than completely truthful. To the extent such tests can be psychologically constructed to filter out such bias, the test becomes complex and cumbersome, to that users simply do not finish the test.
Another testing regime is set out in U.S. Pat. No. 6,840,908, entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR REMOTELY ADMINISTERED, INTERACTIVE HEARING TESTS,” issued to Edwards and others on 11 Jan. 2005, and owned by the assignee of the present application. That patent presents a number of techniques for such testing, most particularly a technique called “N-Alternative Forced Choice,” in which a user is offered a number of audio choices among which to select one that sounds best to her. Also known as “sound flavors,” based on the notion of presenting sound and asking the user which one is preferred, this method can lack sufficient detail to enable the analyst to build a profile.
In sum, at least three different forms of test procedure have been employed by the art, without arriving at a method that produces accurate results in a way that makes mass deployment possible.
The ultimate goal of personalization efforts is the delivery of personalized audio content. That goal actually encompasses a number of distinct products and processes. For example, one facet of this effort aims at offering devices that deliver personalized audio signals to a user. U.S. Pat. No. 6,944,474, issued to Rader and others, describes a mobile phone with audio processing functionality that can be adapted to the hearing profile of the user. In another example, International Publication No. WO 01/24576 A1, entitled PRODUCING AND STORING HEARING PROFILES AND CUSTOMIZED AUDIO DATA BASED (sic), by Pluvinage, describes a variety of applications of hearing profile data. Among the specific applications mentioned there is downloading audio content, such as MP3 music files, which have been conditioned to match a user profile already on file with the provider.
The prior art has focused on coupling hearing aids using wireless networks to other devices, for the purpose of programming the hearing aid and for coupling the hearing aid with sources of sound other than the ambient environment. See, for example, International Publication No. WO 2004/110099 A2, entitled HEARING AID WIRELESS NETWORK, by Larsen et al.; International Publication No. WO 01/54458 A2, entitled HEARING AID SYSTEMS, by Eaton et al.; German Laid-open Specification DE 102 22 408 A 1, entitled INTEGRATION OF HEARING SYSTEMS INTO HOUSEHOLD TECHNOLOGY PLATFORMS by Dageforde. In Larsen et al. and Dageforde, for example, the idea is described of coupling a hearing aid by wireless network to a number of sources of sound, such as door bells, mobile phones, televisions, various other household appliances and audio broadcast systems. Co-pending and co-owned U.S. Application PERSONAL SOUND SYSTEM INCLUDING MULTI-MODE EAR LEVEL MODULE WITH PRIORITY LOGIC; application Ser. No. 11/569,499, filed 21 Nov. 2006, by Cohen et al. (Publication No. US-2007-0255435-A1) describes implementation of user customizable ear modules for use in a variety of settings, including the ability to process audio using hearing profiles of the users.
A drawback of many products offered to date has been the significant data processing workload required at each audio source to support participation in the network. There remains a need for techniques to reduce these data processing requirements.